"THE TRAVELLER"
At the University of Edinburgh, Goldsmith became a more earnest
student. He was certainly not without the higher aspirations of the
sublime profession to which circumstance and necessity rather than
aptitude or inclination had called him. Whilst it may be questioned
whether he ever had the poetic imagination of the physician, he never
allowed the honour in which he held the vocation to lessen, and never
lost the satisfaction he himself cherished through his association
with this calling. To the last he was proud of being--or as his
cynical critic might say, of counting himself--a doctor. In Scotland
he worked harder, studied chemistry with intelligence, and evinced
considerable ability. He viewed with ardour his prospective work in
life, and was keenly interested in the medical system and the surgical
processes of that period. As a student he was respected. He became a
conspicuous member of the Medical Society. It is needless, however, to
add that his studies were not so strenuous as to make his mood at any
time monastic, compelling him to live heedless of passing pleasures
and delightful days, or forgetful of his fellow-men.
Goldsmith had been very poor in Dublin. He was not rich in Edinburgh,
but he was welcomed in the refined circles of both University and
civic society. He discovered his place amongst graceful and gracious
women and high-minded and cultured men, and then, all at once, amid
all his new-found success and happiness, he unexpectedly closed his
medical career at the University and left not less suddenly than he
had come. Nothing could be more abrupt than his departure. Rumour has
it that, with chaotic benevolence, he had become security for one of
his fellow-students for a considerable sum of money on account of a
tailor's bill. Here we have the prototype of "the good-natured man."
[Illustration:
_Rischgitz Collection._]
GOLDSMITH AS A YOUNG MAN.
(From the rare etching by Bretherton after Bunbury's drawing.)]
Goldsmith could make nothing of mathematics, and held this science
fit only for mean intellects. Later in his life this delightful
philosopher confided to Malone that he still held the study in a kind
of scorn, seeing that he could himself turn an ode of Horace into
English better than any of the mathematicians. There is scarcely an
infinitesimal sign of the principle of mathematical precision about
the career of Oliver Goldsmith. Yet in Scotland, possibly because the
virtue of prudence is infectious, during this period, for some time
and by some miracle, Noll cultivated a habit to which he was
throughout his career very slightly addicted--he paid his way. Yet
when he was leaving this centre of learning we find Uncle Contarine
once more besought, and this time for twenty rapidly forthcoming
sterling pounds, to carry Mr. Oliver to the Continent for the
completion of his medical education. The wandering spirit had seized
him. Paris and Leyden, with their learned lecturers, were but pretexts
for travelling and fulfilling the long-cherished hope of seeing
foreign lands. He thirsted for deep draughts of experience flowing
from the hidden springs of unknown climes. Professor Masson wittily
tells us that as Goldsmith had planned to go to Paris, of course
he arrived in the end at Leyden. Having secured those necessary
munitions of war which to the full extent of his means Uncle Contarine
unfailingly provided, Goldsmith set sail in a ship bound for Bordeaux.
At Newcastle he was, by mistake, arrested as a political prisoner and
retained in durance as a Jacobite. The ship sailed without him. It
sank; every life was lost. Soon after reaching Leyden, Goldsmith left
that seat of learning for his wanderings through Europe, his only
aids to this majestic design being a fine voice and an instrument of
music--some sort of flute, we must presume. It was a queer pilgrimage.
The peasantry gave the minstrel food by day and a bed at night.
Village after village welcomed him. He left Leyden penniless. He
might have had a useful coin or two to help him, but that, espying
some lovely flowers, he could not resist buying all his poor purse
permitted and sending them to Uncle Contarine. No long-suffering
uncle, in all the chronicles and all the untold trials of uncles,
deserved better of a nephew than this good old man.
Goldsmith's ramble through Europe was one of the maddest escapades in
the records of the eccentricities of adolescent genius. The enterprise
was attended with ceaseless difficulty, danger, and deprivation. Not
seldom the hedgeside yielded him his nightly rest. Places of learning
from time to time gave the wanderer a dinner. He could make the
monasteries havens of repose. For a little while he acted as guide and
tutor to the son of some wealthy manufacturer. This youth cared
nothing for architecture or antiquity, the histories of cities, or
natural scenery. His sole purpose seemed to be to save money on his
travels. The liberal and lively tutor left a pupil as dull as he was
mean. The love of wandering lay deep in Goldsmith's heart. This early
pilgrimage through much of Europe inspired his pen to write _The
Traveller_. In later years he had throughout this eager longing for a
roving life.
Notwithstanding his roaming, in some inexplicable manner, Goldsmith,
the pilgrim of improvidence and knight errant from the Order of
Chivalrous Carelessness, still pursued his medical studies, and
carried this training for the vocation of a doctor to some kind of
completion. Italy is supposed to have conferred his diploma as a
physician upon Goldsmith, and either Padua or Louvain has the honour.
_The Traveller_ must, indeed, long have been in all its grace and
beauty treasured in his heart, for he actually penned lines for this
fine poem during these boyish wanderings through Europe.
This sojourn on the Continent occupied two years or more. He reached
England in the year 1756, landing at Dover. This penniless pilgrim
made his way on foot, bravely trudging the highroad, with few hopes of
coming fame, but many pangs of very present poverty. Our minstrel
gathered a little money here and there by singing ditties and ballads,
spontaneous compositions, delightfully original, to cheer him and the
laughing rustic hearts he met and loved, lads and maids, old men and
children, and all, forthwith and henceforth and for ever, his friends.
Tramping from Dover, receiving a warm English welcome at many a
wayside farm, and the hearty hospitality of the cottage hearth and
home; anon sleeping in barns, or, if need be, making the hedgerow his
haven and shelter for the night, passing village after village--the
days went by, and then he sighted the great town of great trial. He
entered London, the city of cities, with its innumerable multitudes
and its untold loneliness.
No one can read the opening line in _The Traveller_--
"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow"--
without feeling that the words could only have sprung from very
genius. We have here that uniqueness that signalises and divides.
Throughout there is that sincerity of sentiment which separates and
guides those deeper natures who amid all joys know the vein of sorrow
prevailing in the human heart. From yearning aspiration comes that
exaltation which connotes the higher character. It is this element
that we are apt to forget in our humorists. Lamb, Hood, Thackeray, and
Goldsmith, had strains of reflection which went more into the very
heart of being and not being, fulfilling and failing, living and
dying, than we can ever discover in those who decorate their days with
a clamant seriousness. That semblance of earnestness accepted by the
populace often lacks poetic force and sublime sanction. _The
Traveller_ attains the heights and depths of the Divine communion that
unites poetry with prayer. The speeding pen, the quivering lips, the
moving mind, and beating heart, are slight contrasted with this
prayerful yearning of the unseen and spiritual. Poetry is the
unutterable, yet sweetly and strangely uttered voicing of the soul
ineffable.
_She Stoops to Conquer_ inspired Sheridan with his inimitable dramatic
conceptions. _The Traveller_ roused Byron to the heights he attained
in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." _The Traveller_ heralds an era and
proclaims the true imperial note, clear and triumphant. If poetry be
the prophetic vein, calling an age to realise its aspirations,
foreseeing, forewarning, and foremaking coming time, then here the
poet, the maker, and the creator, speaks. Nor kings nor warriors
rule, but thinkers, and amongst these rulers in the high realm of
thought and spiritual power, highest of all in every age and
clime--the poet! Hidden in the soul's depths we discover an
earnestness which in the outward light-hearted man we fail to
recognise. That one we thought we knew so well, we find, too late, we
knew, if not altogether ill, at least too slightingly. The poem is
doubtless too didactic at times to always move consummate delight.
There is a ring more Latin than English in the line,
"Wealth, commerce, honour, liberty, content."
Yet even in this we see how words can weigh with meaning, and not one
prove wasted, but each contributes to the fulfilling of the complete
intention. This line has that poetic power which in one single flash
can show what volumes men might write and not reveal. Pope crippled
meaning and weakened force to procure a rhyme--nay, since he actually
planned the rhymes to make his couplets before he penned his poetry,
to him not infrequently it was far more to rhyme than realise. In
Goldsmith's couplet,
"Till carried to excess in each domain,
This favourite good begets peculiar pain,"
we have a dissertation upon both individual and national ethics, and
the sole secret of the failures of men and States. There appear
passages where Goldsmith held Virgil much in view. To some extent this
poem, and also _The Deserted Village_, remind one of Volney. In this
light the style in places is more French than English. There is full
force in the phrase,
"And e'en in penance, planning sins anew."
While the poem is always graceful, readers are not at their happiest
when pleasing poets turn philosophers. Throughout the piece there is a
manly courage, a purity of motive, a magnanimous ideality, and an
unexpected and almost muscular robustness. What gaiety there is in
this phrase--
"Sport and flutter in a kinder sky."
We have, when he comes to France, upon which country he writes
delightfully, a couplet happily autobiographical:
"Yet would the village praise my wondrous power,
And dance forgetful of the noontide hour."
Radiant must have been the moments when later the little man in Fleet
Street could look back on scenes like these. We wish that his own
graceful pen had granted us a full and vivid record of his roamings.
It cannot be said that from the higher standpoint Goldsmith owed much
to Dublin, Edinburgh, Leyden, or Louvain. His class-rooms for the
study of life were provided in rustic inns, his studious chambers
village greens in the land where he was born, French riversides,
Swiss mountains, Italian lakes, the blue skies of many climes, and
later the crowded streets of the London he loved. His books were the
hearts of women, the smiles of children, and the lives of men.